Topic: looking for a recipe for tomato sauce

[Jayb]

I have some spare ripe toms at the moment and I’m looking for a few ideas for a tomato pasta sauce recipe. I usually just do a basic passata, tomato and garlic, sometimes onion.  Remove skins and most of the seeds then cook it down until it thickens a bit.  I then freeze it in suitable size bags and containers, handy to put into sauces,  casseroles  and soups etc. But I’m looking more for a yummy tomato pasta sauce recipe, ready to use as such from the freezer, so if anyone has any favourites I’d be very interested.

I'm also looking for a good tomato ketchup recipe, pleaseeeeeeeee  ;D

[Melbourne12]

Our tomato-based sauces are very simple, so we tend to freeze our excess tommies as passata or simply chopped tomatoes and make the sauce as required.

But I can recommend a ketchup recipe:

2lb Tomatoes
1 medium Onion chopped
4 Garlic cloves chopped
2 tablespoons Vegetable Oil (we use groundnut rather than olive for this, but it's a matter of taste)
1/2 teaspoon Rock or Sea salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground Black Pepper
1 teaspoon Chili Powder (or less to taste)
1/2 teaspoon Paprika (or more to taste)
Small piece of Cinnamon) or 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon Ground allspice
Tomato paste (see instructions)
4oz Demerara sugar
3 to 4 fl oz (around 100ml)  Cider vinegar

Puree tomatoes in blender until smooth. Cook onion and garlic in oil with salt in a heavy-based saucepan over low to medium heat, stirring occasionally until golden, about 8 minutes.

Add spices and cook, stirring frequently, 1 minute.

Add tomato puree, sugar, and vinegar. Depending on your tomatoes, you may need to add a small tin or half a tube of tomato paste.  If you've got a crop of San Marzano, which have relatively little juice, you won't need much tomato paste.  If (heaven help you) you've got a load of Moneymaker, you're going to need a lot of paste.  Most eating tomatoes will need some paste adding.

Simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally and adding tomato paste if needed, until very thick, 45-55 minutes. Stir more frequently toward end of cooking to prevent scorching. Remove the cinnamon stick.  Let cool.

Puree ketchup in blender until smooth. Chill at least 2 hours to allow flavour to develop.

Keeps chilled in refrigerator 1 month, or can be bottled.

We use a Vitamix blender, which is more than capable of blitzing the cores and skins.  If your blender isn't sufficiently powerful, it will leave shreds of skin in the ketchup, which you may think spoils the appearance.  In that case you might want to sieve it (which is a pain but keeps the flavour) or peel the tomatoes before starting (which will lose some of the colour and flavour).

[manicscousers]

we make our pizza topping from excess toms and freeze,
as many toms, whatever variety is ripe, onions, chilli, garlic,peppers, any spare courgettes, mushrooms hanging around, all roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt,pepper, bit of oregano and basil, take out the skins when cooked and blitz , simples 
means picky grandchildren will eat it and not know what's in it, also use it with pasta

[Jill]

The one I use as a basic tomato sauce is:

1 Kg ripe tomatoes, halved
3-4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tbs olive oil.
S&P
Arrange tomatoes in a roasting tray.  Sprinkle garlic over and drizzle olive oil evenly all over.  Season with s&p.  Roast in oven (180^oC/Mark 4) for 35-45 mins, until tomatoes are soft and slightly browned.  Rub through a sieve. Et voila.

[Jayb]

Super looking tomato sauce recipe Melbourne, I just need to get some ground Allspice tomorrow and then it looks like a tomato weekend.

Thanks Manics and Jill, I think I may have been missing out on a bit of flavour by not roasting, I'll certainly be trying these two at the weekend too. I think the bottom Rayburn oven overnight, should be just right  :) I like the idea of adding in allsorts for a pizza topping.

[plainleaf]

do you have a problem with a very old ketchup recipe?
when I mean old, I mean very old  from the 1850's

[plainleaf]

seasonable recipe- the following for making tomato catsup is highly spoken of:
take 1 bushel of tomatoes , and boil them until they are soft - squeeze them though a fine
wire sieve and add half gallon or vinegar, three half pints of salt, two ounces of cloves. quarter pound of all spice , three ounces of cayenne pepper, 3 table spoons of black pepper, five heads of garlic, skinned, and separated. mix together and boil about three hours, or until 
mix together or until reduced about  one half then bottle without straining.
recipe from my local newspaper Aug,29,1855

[:(]

They must have had big kitchens in those days!

[Jayb]

I don't have a pan that big! But I'm sure I can adjust it down, thank you for posting. Super to have such an old recipe, is it one you use?

[queenbee]

Mrs Beeton's recipe for Tomato and Onions from "Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery" about 1886. Just remembered I had a copy of this book. Had to go in the loft to find it. Have not seen it for the last 20 years. Belonged to my mother and her mother. It was written for allotment holders.

THE RECIPE

1 dozen ripe tomatoes, their weight in onions, a quart of vinigar, a teaspoonful of allspice, 2oz of black pepper.
Average cost 3 shillings.

Wipe the tomatoes dry and take off the skins of the onions, put them in a stew pan with the other ingredients and let them simmer for 8 hours. When cold, bottle and tie over with a bladder.

[plainleaf]

the same newspaper also has recipe for catsup in 1859.
Jayb i have used the recipe and you real don't need that big a kitchen to make just a big pot.

[Digeroo]

Wow the recipe sounds good but how much is a bushel.  Seems it is 4 pecks.  I think there is a song form Guys and Dolls about a bushel and a peck.

Seems it is 36 litres or 8 uk gallons or 10 US.  Blimey how much catsup did they need?

It is also very heavy on the salt.  The resulting bottle should carry a goverment health warning!    Please do not have high blood pressure folks.  My OH had a bleed stroke and the results can be most unpleasant.

[plainleaf]

Digeroo you seem to forget they did not have stores that sold bottle food back then. canned and jarred food did not really be come popular till years later.
 

[Digeroo]

My mother in law used to bottles loads of things.  And I was born soon after the war and things were still in short supply so bottling was very much an in thing in my childhood.  I remember bottling plums in particular.  I still have a load of empty bottling jars in the back of one of my cupboards.

But even so 4 gallons of tomato ketchup is quite a large quantity. 

[Jayb]

I love Mrs Beeton! Thanks for the recipe it is different from the ones I have.

Plainleaf I don't have a pot anywhere near that size, it would be totally impracticable for me and I suspect many others, but I'm happy to downsize the recipe, I hadn't registered the amount of salt, I wonder if that was to help as a preservative? Seems rather a lot for modern day and I think I'll add to suit my taste. I'll post the downsized recipe once its done.

Have to agree as much as I adore tomato ketchup even in my dreams I couldn't manage 4 gallons in a year, but I guess it could have been used to swap and barter.

[Melbourne12]

seasonable recipe- the following for making tomato catsup is highly spoken of:
take 1 bushel of tomatoes , and boil them until they are soft - squeeze them though a fine
wire sieve and add half gallon or vinegar, three half pints of salt, two ounces of cloves. quarter pound of all spice , three ounces of cayenne pepper, 3 table spoons of black pepper, five heads of garlic, skinned, and separated. mix together and boil about three hours, or until 
mix together or until reduced about  one half then bottle without straining.
recipe from my local newspaper Aug,29,1855

This is very interesting, since it has close similarities as well as big differences with modern recipes.  To scale it down to 2lb of tomatoes, divide by 50 (there being anything between 40 and 60 lb of tomatoes in a bushel, depending on the size of the tomatoes!)

So that gives around 3 or 4 fl oz of vinegar - check

Around 16g of salt - higher than my recipe which has around 3 or 4 grams, but not outrageous.  Remember this wouldn't be fine table salt, but rock salt.  I reckon a pint and a half to weigh around 800g.

Sugar - none.  Which may be why more salt is needed.  But it won't taste like modern ketchup.  It may well be much more "tomatoey"!

Garlic - a couple of cloves.  Similar.  I use 4, but it's a matter of taste.

Onion - none

Spices - pretty light compared to mine, but again it's a matter of taste. Personally I don't like cloves in tomato ketchup and sauces, but plenty of recipes include them.

Cooking time - 3 hours.  That's a long time to stand and stir a pot, which is why tomato paste as a thickener is such a blessing.

I might give it a try.  At worst it'll go into pasta sauces, and at best it'll be a delicious and healthy alternative to the high sugar recipes.

[Jayb]

I'm a bit behind but I've finally made up several loads of oven roasted tomato pasta sauce, I've left some plain and added chopped black and green olives to one batch and roasted aubergine to another. Very nice indeed, thanks for the ideas.

I've picked more toms and hoping to make ketchup in the next few days :)

[JayC]

This is the recipe that was vegan friendly. You can make it into homemade recipe. I found the site that shared this homemade tomato pasta sauce recipe, the site of taste dot com was might be good for you to visit. This is how we can see those simple tips for the following procedure.